You may technically be allowed to sell these in some context, but you'll need a lot of luck to actually do so.
Enter The Dragon of all things nobody wants you to have. The don't have full bucky-sized sets, but you can buy the pieces for both buckyballs and buckycubes.
If I had a spare $22,000 I'd love to have a buckyball set made of these.
3.) No one except Bob really knows how the system works.
Google Docs will fix this.
Umm, I think he means that nobody who uses the system knows how it works, not that nobody on the planet does.
Simply using Google Docs won't fix the problem of nobody knowing how the system works when they don't know how to create systems in Google Docs or how this particular use has been set up. Google engineers might be able to wing it, but I, for one, would have no idea how things were done.
We've got one Google Doc that I have to use to make some time reports. I have the URL bookmarked, I know how to enter the data it asks for. I have no clue how to add fields or change things, like, for example, replacing a huge scroll list of names with the name of the user who is accessing the Doc. I'm at the mercy of the Doc admin. As they are with Bob.
With no care at all?
That claim does not reflect reality.
Yes, that claim does not reflect reality. Until we get the appointed board that controls the costs of Obamacare by deciding who is worth getting treated and who isn't.
By the way, cancer isn't treated in ERs. Funny how an ER doctor wouldn't treat it, huh?
It is immoral to force doctors to live up to some sort of standard?
That depends on what that "some sort of" standard is, now doesn't it?
I mean, apparently, based on your previous comments, your standard is "never 'let' anyone with cancer die", which is, unfortunately, an impossible standard and would thus be immoral to try to enforce. Depending on the penalties for failure, you'd have a mass exodus from the field of oncology and nobody with cancer would be able to get treatment. Kinda like the high price of malpractice insurance limiting the availability of OBs.
If the standard is "goes to school to learn how to be a doctor and passes some exams to show a minimum level of knowledge", then that's not sush a high standard that it cannot be met and wouldn't be immoral to enforce.
Storing a png of this record costs near nothing.
Yes, but getting it into a PNG format might cost something, depending on the original format. A paper EKG, for example, would have a non-zero cost being converted, especially considering the expense of quality control on the process. Google can scan old books relatively cheaply because nobody will die if they have bad scans included in a book (and they have a lot of them).
The summary of this article is typically off-kilter. Obsolete formats don't have anything to do with DRM or "vendor independence". As just one example, floppies, for most people, are an obsolete format, and the data they contain is likely not DRMd nor is it vendor specific. I have a drawer of optical disks that are unreadable today, yet back when they were, they would fit in any industry standard magnetooptical drive, and the data they contain is, in large part, jpegs.
you dont have to count the vote, but to scan the envelope when received.
The envelope is not removed from the ballot box until after the polls close. The box I put my ballot into looked remarkably low-tech, and I did not see any scanning mechanism, or any way of powering a scanning mechanism, or any way of sending data back to some central server so that I could make sure my vote was counted.
Even were there such a mechanism carefully hidden within the simple enclosure being used, simply scanning my envelope and telling me that I had deposited it in the box is not the information that is required. I already know I did that because I did it myself. That scanned ballot envelope still has to go through the hands of the election officials who still have the ability to discard it for several reasons, after the polls close and I am no longer able to contest their decision. Perhaps I can learn of their decision were there some published website that contained it, but by the time the information appears there it is too late to do anything about it.
To vote for that candidate, you just fill in the gap with a marker.
I'm sorry, that system is unacceptable. By "filling in the gap", you create a symbol that looks like an arrow. Using the arrow symbol is offensive to native americans and cannot be tolerated in a tolerant society.
You WANT me not to understand that big numbers can be divided into smaller ones. You WANT it to be that I am annoyed that I am wrong.
What I want is irrelevant. You've already demonstrated that you do not understand the problem because you keep saying that someone has to count 90 million ballots. That's patently absurd, for the reasons already explained to you. I don't WANT for you to ignore or fail to understand what has already been said. I'd rather you pick up on the concept of "states", and that each state has "counties", and that each county often has more than one "precint" or "district", and that the problem of someone having to count 90 million votes doesn't exist because there are thousands or tens of thousands of people who each count a small subset of those 90 million.
I'd also like it if you understood the idea that the counting of 90 million ballots en-masse is a worthless and meaningless concept, since the President of the US (the only election that would come close to having 90 million people voting) isn't elected by counting the number of votes for each candidate, it's done by each state adding up the counts from each of the subsets within that state and then sending a certain number of electors to the electoral college to make the final vote. And that number, whether you want to admit it or not, is much much much less than 90 million.
If you are annoyed that you are wrong, well, that's just fine and dandy, but I really couldn't care less if you are.
Your comments about the scanning machines being part of some "electronic voting system", well, that's just as incorrect. Scanning machines are scanning machines and work irrespective of the way the input source is created. They are neither necessary nor sufficient to create an "electronic voting system." That means you can have electronic systems without them, and by themselves they aren't an 'electronic voting system'.
And the problems of electronic voting systems are trivial to solve? Then they would have been by now. Many many smart people have been working on this for many years, some of them coming up with some complex answers, some less complex. All of the answers still have flaws and potential points of failure. Different ones than the paper system, surely, but still ways to break the system or game it.
If you think you can solve the problems and come up with a perfect system, good luck to you. I'd love to see the result you come up with.
The problem with hand counting paper ballots is that there is no reliable way to hand count 90 million ballots.
Good thing there isn't anyone who needs to count 90 million ballots. Each precinct/county has a much more limited number of ballots to count. Easily handled by hand, or by simple scanning machines.
In fact, there is no state with 90 million people as a population, and the largest government entity in any election, Presidential included, is the state. Your number is a bit of hyperbole to begin with.
It is failing because the machines are poorly designed and those with a say don't feel it is important to fix.
It isn't poor design, it's poor solutions to a problem that is well known and can already be dealt with. Every electronic voting system comes with inherrent problems, even the best designed ones. Those problems are often worse than the problems they're trying to solve.
Unless you have a tabulated database of the envelope / voter status (accepted / error), that voters are able to refer to before the election ends,
The ballot I just put in the box won't come out of the box until long after the polls "close". My vote deserves to be counted just as much as someone who put it in the box 13 days ago, and even he doesn't have any guarantees that his vote will be taken out of the box until after the polls close.
P.S. there is no "early voting period". It's one length of time.
Yes, yes, how DID those people live back in the days when you didn't know the results of an election for a day or two? I mean, how could you possibly plan ahead if you don't know who will be inaugurated on Jan. 20 of the next year by at least 10PM on the night of the election? Simply barbaric, I say.
Oh, wait. Vote count delays are GOOD if you are trying to delay the result until after the Constitutionally-mandated reporting deadline and you know your candidate will lose otherwise.
The ease in which paper votes can be "lost" in transit to the counting facility?
Also barbaric. I mean, nobody EVER lost a USB memory stick with vote results on it, have they?
The ease with which paper ballots can be tampered with?
Also barbaric. I mean, if you cannot afford two people (one from each party) at a minimum watching the process, then yes, someone could do all kinds of things with the ballots. And nobody could ever write a computer virus or something that invisibly modified the counts or anything. Simply impossible.
The fact that there are plenty of people who can easily screw up a paper ballot (aka hanging chads)?
Ah yes, the famous "hanging chads". Ok, all sarcasm aside, if someone is too stupid to be able to use a pointy stick to poke a hole in a piece of paper THAT HAS BEEN PRE-SCORED to make it easy, then they probably shouldn't be voting anyway. Why is it that nobody ever complained that simpletons might have their attempts at voting foiled by a broken pencil lead, but everyone is all atwitter when those same people can't poke a hole in a piece of paper?
I mean, even you if can't tell if your "punch card" ballot has holes in the right place, you should be able to look at it and say "gee, I voted for five people and there aren't ANY holes in this piece of paper." Kinda like the old days when you knew you voted for five people on a paper ballot and when you got ready to hand it in you didn't see any marks at all on the ballot. Something wrong! Seek assistance! No, just turn the ballot in and complain later.
Why yes, there's certainly no failure modes for that. Not at all.
I like having a polling place. It means that you actually know that your vote entered the system, unlike vote-by-mail where it can be thrown out for any number of reasons without you ever having a chance to contest them. If your right to vote is contested, you know it, and if you've provided sufficient proof that you can vote your vote goes in the same box with everyone else's. If the clerk throws your vote-by-mail ballot out at 9PM on election night because the signatures don't look like they match, you're SOL.
You say you get the point and then repeat the same thing. No, posting anything to an anonymous service does NOTHING to give you "more opportunities" to prove anything to anyone. You can't use it to prove you did anything because your name isn't on it.
Any unscrupulous individual who expects you to provide proof to support his nefarious purpose is gonna wallop you good until your ears bleed because you can't prove to him you did what he told you, and without proof, he's gonna assume you didn't.
Stop trying to ban things and learn to work with what kids have natural interests in.
It has nothing to do with the message ("what kids have a natural interest in"), but with the medium.
In Too Big To Know the point is made that the online medium is creating a generation that has a shorter attention span and cannot deal with more traditional means of education (like reading paper books.) It's the natural result of working in an instant gratification environment.
It's not a case of banning anything, it's a case of teachers who have thirty little people in their care trying to be able to teach all thirty of them the things that those little people ought to know, like how to make change. Thirty people with thirty second attention spans would be impossible to manage in any organized way. Just as you get Billy paying attention, Suzie's mind has wandered off to something else.
Or it means he threw it away because it has been useless for most of the last seven years.
Useless, other than as ID to allow him to vote. Free country, people get to decide what's important to them for many things, and keeping an expired driver's license around to be able to vote is one of those things.
Of course if you are using a mail-in ballot you can show it to anyone you want before dropping it in the mail. They could even watch you seal the envelope and drop it in the mail for you.
No, of coure that's silly. That could never happen. It would never happen. No spouse would ever fill out a ballot for his SO, nor would anyone sell an empty, signed ballot to anyone. Nor would anyone be a "helpful Hank" and stand near a busy ballot drop box, helping drive-by voters by taking the ballot from their car window and putting in the box (or saving it for later to modify). I live in Oregon, and that's the official policy towards our vote-by-mail system.
Nevermind that there have been reports of people who get their ballots someplace like the post office, decide they don't want to vote, and then throw them in the trash where anyone can pick them out and vote... No, that would never happen either.
And most of all, nobody would have their vote silently thrown away because the county election officials didn't think your signature was close enough to the one on record, and since they didn't throw it away until after the polls close you have no chance to contest the matter and actually get your vote to count. No, not at all. Never happens.
I wonder to what extent the limitation of FAT support to read-only use was Microsoft's fault,
Not a bit. You can write to the card when the XOOM is a USB disk, which means all the code necessary to do writes is on the hardware. It's just mounted read-only under Android. A conscious decision from Google to limit the usefulness of the device.
And the fact that you CAN access external media, unlike...
the Motorola XOOM "Google Experience", where the external SD card has been made READ ONLY, except when the device is mounted as a USB disk. So, you cannot store anything you create locally, or download via WiFi, on the external media. You can't even delete things you are finished with from the external media except by connecting baby to momma and doing it from a real computer.
And this behaviour was part of an "upgrade" to the OS.
especially in areas with no desirable cable television provider?
If you automatically discard one provider because you don't like them, you've made a conscious choice to do so. They still offer a technically feasible and useful solution to your problem, you've just decided not to count them for political or social reasons.
So, the "undesirable" cable television provider is still an alternative solution to the problem of losing your copper pair when getting "faster than DSL" internet. Tethered 3/4g, wireless, satellite, cable; all are potential other sources.
It's like trying to claim that GM doesn't make cars, when the fact is they make cars but you don't like GM as a company. Personally, I dislike the telco* more than the cable company, but want a copper pair for resiliency, too.
* they lied to me about static addresses being included in the DSL package, and couldn't manage to install it on the correct line when they managed to do it. Then they lied to the PUC when I complained about them lying about the static addresses. Most recently, they ran me around for 45 minutes over a $0.75 charge for a three-way call that couldn't possibly have been made from my phone, repeatedly claiming that "the computer says the call was made and that proves it was."
Not according to some of the conservatives I know, they say that the federal government shouldn't be involved in disaster relief. They also criticize Obama for not doing enough in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy.
The conservatives I know say that yes, the government should make resources available for disaster relief but only at the request of the local civil authorities, and that Obama is grandstanding in response to Sandy. Something along the lines of the stock "never waste a good crisis"?
Just add an easement to your city's antenna tower permits that will allow people to put in ham radio repeaters with autopatches.
Individuals will pay for their own transceivers for free (as they have for about a century) and hams will move traffic that can be done simplex to other frequencies.
I haven't seen a repeater with an autopatch for years. It costs too much and is too ripe for abuse.
The rest of the bit about mandating ALL government agencies to allow ham systems on their towers FOR FREE is good, however. It's patently absurd for DHS and the FCC to be touting the "when all else fails" ability of amateur radio with one hand and then USFS and other agencies to charge those same amateurs ridiculous rates to allow them to put up equipment to be "when all else fails".
If we really need such an item, then they shouldn't cost anything to use - otherwise it's government-sponsored profiteering during a disaster. Put them in accessible locations that are monitored, so we know they'll work when they're needed - maybe inside local businesses. And yes, this will cost money, so figure out a way to pay for installing and maintaining this new service.
So it's better to have government sponsored profiteering all the time instead of government sponsored profiteering just during a disaster?
If it were up to me, though, I'd rather see the time and energy spent on making the cell network more robust.
For that to happen, your cell rates would go way up, and there would have to be a way for true emergency users to get priority over "hey, Aunt Martha, we're all ok" kinds of calls. The mandated increase in capacity/redundancy/backup that would force rates up would be another example of government sponsored profiteering, wouldn't it?
The true issue is that nobody wants to pay for the overbuilding necessary to deal with disaster resiliency. Do you build your house to survive a 500 year earthquake, for example? Do you install a trunked radio system with 40 channels "just in case", when you only use two or three at most during normal operations? When you build your 911 PSAP, do you build another fully functional one at the same time "just in case"? Do you have the budget to do it right twice, or just enough to do it right once?
Slashdot Mirror
You may technically be allowed to sell these in some context, but you'll need a lot of luck to actually do so.
Enter The Dragon of all things nobody wants you to have. The don't have full bucky-sized sets, but you can buy the pieces for both buckyballs and buckycubes.
If I had a spare $22,000 I'd love to have a buckyball set made of these.
3.) No one except Bob really knows how the system works.
Google Docs will fix this.
Umm, I think he means that nobody who uses the system knows how it works, not that nobody on the planet does.
Simply using Google Docs won't fix the problem of nobody knowing how the system works when they don't know how to create systems in Google Docs or how this particular use has been set up. Google engineers might be able to wing it, but I, for one, would have no idea how things were done.
We've got one Google Doc that I have to use to make some time reports. I have the URL bookmarked, I know how to enter the data it asks for. I have no clue how to add fields or change things, like, for example, replacing a huge scroll list of names with the name of the user who is accessing the Doc. I'm at the mercy of the Doc admin. As they are with Bob.
With no care at all? That claim does not reflect reality.
Yes, that claim does not reflect reality. Until we get the appointed board that controls the costs of Obamacare by deciding who is worth getting treated and who isn't.
By the way, cancer isn't treated in ERs. Funny how an ER doctor wouldn't treat it, huh?
It is immoral to force doctors to live up to some sort of standard?
That depends on what that "some sort of" standard is, now doesn't it?
I mean, apparently, based on your previous comments, your standard is "never 'let' anyone with cancer die", which is, unfortunately, an impossible standard and would thus be immoral to try to enforce. Depending on the penalties for failure, you'd have a mass exodus from the field of oncology and nobody with cancer would be able to get treatment. Kinda like the high price of malpractice insurance limiting the availability of OBs.
If the standard is "goes to school to learn how to be a doctor and passes some exams to show a minimum level of knowledge", then that's not sush a high standard that it cannot be met and wouldn't be immoral to enforce.
Storing a png of this record costs near nothing.
Yes, but getting it into a PNG format might cost something, depending on the original format. A paper EKG, for example, would have a non-zero cost being converted, especially considering the expense of quality control on the process. Google can scan old books relatively cheaply because nobody will die if they have bad scans included in a book (and they have a lot of them).
The summary of this article is typically off-kilter. Obsolete formats don't have anything to do with DRM or "vendor independence". As just one example, floppies, for most people, are an obsolete format, and the data they contain is likely not DRMd nor is it vendor specific. I have a drawer of optical disks that are unreadable today, yet back when they were, they would fit in any industry standard magnetooptical drive, and the data they contain is, in large part, jpegs.
you dont have to count the vote, but to scan the envelope when received.
The envelope is not removed from the ballot box until after the polls close. The box I put my ballot into looked remarkably low-tech, and I did not see any scanning mechanism, or any way of powering a scanning mechanism, or any way of sending data back to some central server so that I could make sure my vote was counted.
Even were there such a mechanism carefully hidden within the simple enclosure being used, simply scanning my envelope and telling me that I had deposited it in the box is not the information that is required. I already know I did that because I did it myself. That scanned ballot envelope still has to go through the hands of the election officials who still have the ability to discard it for several reasons, after the polls close and I am no longer able to contest their decision. Perhaps I can learn of their decision were there some published website that contained it, but by the time the information appears there it is too late to do anything about it.
To vote for that candidate, you just fill in the gap with a marker.
I'm sorry, that system is unacceptable. By "filling in the gap", you create a symbol that looks like an arrow. Using the arrow symbol is offensive to native americans and cannot be tolerated in a tolerant society.
You WANT me not to understand that big numbers can be divided into smaller ones. You WANT it to be that I am annoyed that I am wrong.
What I want is irrelevant. You've already demonstrated that you do not understand the problem because you keep saying that someone has to count 90 million ballots. That's patently absurd, for the reasons already explained to you. I don't WANT for you to ignore or fail to understand what has already been said. I'd rather you pick up on the concept of "states", and that each state has "counties", and that each county often has more than one "precint" or "district", and that the problem of someone having to count 90 million votes doesn't exist because there are thousands or tens of thousands of people who each count a small subset of those 90 million.
I'd also like it if you understood the idea that the counting of 90 million ballots en-masse is a worthless and meaningless concept, since the President of the US (the only election that would come close to having 90 million people voting) isn't elected by counting the number of votes for each candidate, it's done by each state adding up the counts from each of the subsets within that state and then sending a certain number of electors to the electoral college to make the final vote. And that number, whether you want to admit it or not, is much much much less than 90 million.
If you are annoyed that you are wrong, well, that's just fine and dandy, but I really couldn't care less if you are.
Your comments about the scanning machines being part of some "electronic voting system", well, that's just as incorrect. Scanning machines are scanning machines and work irrespective of the way the input source is created. They are neither necessary nor sufficient to create an "electronic voting system." That means you can have electronic systems without them, and by themselves they aren't an 'electronic voting system'.
And the problems of electronic voting systems are trivial to solve? Then they would have been by now. Many many smart people have been working on this for many years, some of them coming up with some complex answers, some less complex. All of the answers still have flaws and potential points of failure. Different ones than the paper system, surely, but still ways to break the system or game it.
If you think you can solve the problems and come up with a perfect system, good luck to you. I'd love to see the result you come up with.
The problem with hand counting paper ballots is that there is no reliable way to hand count 90 million ballots.
Good thing there isn't anyone who needs to count 90 million ballots. Each precinct/county has a much more limited number of ballots to count. Easily handled by hand, or by simple scanning machines.
In fact, there is no state with 90 million people as a population, and the largest government entity in any election, Presidential included, is the state. Your number is a bit of hyperbole to begin with.
It is failing because the machines are poorly designed and those with a say don't feel it is important to fix.
It isn't poor design, it's poor solutions to a problem that is well known and can already be dealt with. Every electronic voting system comes with inherrent problems, even the best designed ones. Those problems are often worse than the problems they're trying to solve.
Unless you have a tabulated database of the envelope / voter status (accepted / error), that voters are able to refer to before the election ends,
The ballot I just put in the box won't come out of the box until long after the polls "close". My vote deserves to be counted just as much as someone who put it in the box 13 days ago, and even he doesn't have any guarantees that his vote will be taken out of the box until after the polls close.
P.S. there is no "early voting period". It's one length of time.
Vote count delays?
Yes, yes, how DID those people live back in the days when you didn't know the results of an election for a day or two? I mean, how could you possibly plan ahead if you don't know who will be inaugurated on Jan. 20 of the next year by at least 10PM on the night of the election? Simply barbaric, I say.
Oh, wait. Vote count delays are GOOD if you are trying to delay the result until after the Constitutionally-mandated reporting deadline and you know your candidate will lose otherwise.
The ease in which paper votes can be "lost" in transit to the counting facility?
Also barbaric. I mean, nobody EVER lost a USB memory stick with vote results on it, have they?
The ease with which paper ballots can be tampered with?
Also barbaric. I mean, if you cannot afford two people (one from each party) at a minimum watching the process, then yes, someone could do all kinds of things with the ballots. And nobody could ever write a computer virus or something that invisibly modified the counts or anything. Simply impossible.
The fact that there are plenty of people who can easily screw up a paper ballot (aka hanging chads)?
Ah yes, the famous "hanging chads". Ok, all sarcasm aside, if someone is too stupid to be able to use a pointy stick to poke a hole in a piece of paper THAT HAS BEEN PRE-SCORED to make it easy, then they probably shouldn't be voting anyway. Why is it that nobody ever complained that simpletons might have their attempts at voting foiled by a broken pencil lead, but everyone is all atwitter when those same people can't poke a hole in a piece of paper?
I mean, even you if can't tell if your "punch card" ballot has holes in the right place, you should be able to look at it and say "gee, I voted for five people and there aren't ANY holes in this piece of paper." Kinda like the old days when you knew you voted for five people on a paper ballot and when you got ready to hand it in you didn't see any marks at all on the ballot. Something wrong! Seek assistance! No, just turn the ballot in and complain later.
Move to all mail voting,
Why yes, there's certainly no failure modes for that. Not at all.
I like having a polling place. It means that you actually know that your vote entered the system, unlike vote-by-mail where it can be thrown out for any number of reasons without you ever having a chance to contest them. If your right to vote is contested, you know it, and if you've provided sufficient proof that you can vote your vote goes in the same box with everyone else's. If the clerk throws your vote-by-mail ballot out at 9PM on election night because the signatures don't look like they match, you're SOL.
Any unscrupulous individual who expects you to provide proof to support his nefarious purpose is gonna wallop you good until your ears bleed because you can't prove to him you did what he told you, and without proof, he's gonna assume you didn't.
Of course you can just drop by the polling place on election day and your vote on that day will override your absentee vote
WHAT polling place? You perhaps missed the tiny detail that vote-by-mail does away with polling places.
How about here? It's a fascinating read.
Stop trying to ban things and learn to work with what kids have natural interests in.
It has nothing to do with the message ("what kids have a natural interest in"), but with the medium.
In Too Big To Know the point is made that the online medium is creating a generation that has a shorter attention span and cannot deal with more traditional means of education (like reading paper books.) It's the natural result of working in an instant gratification environment.
It's not a case of banning anything, it's a case of teachers who have thirty little people in their care trying to be able to teach all thirty of them the things that those little people ought to know, like how to make change. Thirty people with thirty second attention spans would be impossible to manage in any organized way. Just as you get Billy paying attention, Suzie's mind has wandered off to something else.
Or it means he threw it away because it has been useless for most of the last seven years.
Useless, other than as ID to allow him to vote. Free country, people get to decide what's important to them for many things, and keeping an expired driver's license around to be able to vote is one of those things.
If it is truly anonymous, then no, you couldn't show me proof that you did anything, using it. That's kinda obvious, isn't it?
Of course if you are using a mail-in ballot you can show it to anyone you want before dropping it in the mail. They could even watch you seal the envelope and drop it in the mail for you.
No, of coure that's silly. That could never happen. It would never happen. No spouse would ever fill out a ballot for his SO, nor would anyone sell an empty, signed ballot to anyone. Nor would anyone be a "helpful Hank" and stand near a busy ballot drop box, helping drive-by voters by taking the ballot from their car window and putting in the box (or saving it for later to modify). I live in Oregon, and that's the official policy towards our vote-by-mail system.
Nevermind that there have been reports of people who get their ballots someplace like the post office, decide they don't want to vote, and then throw them in the trash where anyone can pick them out and vote... No, that would never happen either.
And most of all, nobody would have their vote silently thrown away because the county election officials didn't think your signature was close enough to the one on record, and since they didn't throw it away until after the polls close you have no chance to contest the matter and actually get your vote to count. No, not at all. Never happens.
I wonder to what extent the limitation of FAT support to read-only use was Microsoft's fault,
Not a bit. You can write to the card when the XOOM is a USB disk, which means all the code necessary to do writes is on the hardware. It's just mounted read-only under Android. A conscious decision from Google to limit the usefulness of the device.
As opposed to discarding a provider because I'm not willing to move into their service area.
When one uses the adjective "desirable", that implies that there IS a cable provider with internet offerings, just we don't like them for some reason.
And the fact that you CAN access external media, unlike ...
the Motorola XOOM "Google Experience", where the external SD card has been made READ ONLY, except when the device is mounted as a USB disk. So, you cannot store anything you create locally, or download via WiFi, on the external media. You can't even delete things you are finished with from the external media except by connecting baby to momma and doing it from a real computer.
And this behaviour was part of an "upgrade" to the OS.
especially in areas with no desirable cable television provider?
If you automatically discard one provider because you don't like them, you've made a conscious choice to do so. They still offer a technically feasible and useful solution to your problem, you've just decided not to count them for political or social reasons.
So, the "undesirable" cable television provider is still an alternative solution to the problem of losing your copper pair when getting "faster than DSL" internet. Tethered 3/4g, wireless, satellite, cable; all are potential other sources.
It's like trying to claim that GM doesn't make cars, when the fact is they make cars but you don't like GM as a company. Personally, I dislike the telco* more than the cable company, but want a copper pair for resiliency, too.
* they lied to me about static addresses being included in the DSL package, and couldn't manage to install it on the correct line when they managed to do it. Then they lied to the PUC when I complained about them lying about the static addresses. Most recently, they ran me around for 45 minutes over a $0.75 charge for a three-way call that couldn't possibly have been made from my phone, repeatedly claiming that "the computer says the call was made and that proves it was."
Not according to some of the conservatives I know, they say that the federal government shouldn't be involved in disaster relief. They also criticize Obama for not doing enough in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy.
The conservatives I know say that yes, the government should make resources available for disaster relief but only at the request of the local civil authorities, and that Obama is grandstanding in response to Sandy. Something along the lines of the stock "never waste a good crisis"?
Just add an easement to your city's antenna tower permits that will allow people to put in ham radio repeaters with autopatches. Individuals will pay for their own transceivers for free (as they have for about a century) and hams will move traffic that can be done simplex to other frequencies.
I haven't seen a repeater with an autopatch for years. It costs too much and is too ripe for abuse.
The rest of the bit about mandating ALL government agencies to allow ham systems on their towers FOR FREE is good, however. It's patently absurd for DHS and the FCC to be touting the "when all else fails" ability of amateur radio with one hand and then USFS and other agencies to charge those same amateurs ridiculous rates to allow them to put up equipment to be "when all else fails".
If we really need such an item, then they shouldn't cost anything to use - otherwise it's government-sponsored profiteering during a disaster. Put them in accessible locations that are monitored, so we know they'll work when they're needed - maybe inside local businesses. And yes, this will cost money, so figure out a way to pay for installing and maintaining this new service.
So it's better to have government sponsored profiteering all the time instead of government sponsored profiteering just during a disaster?
If it were up to me, though, I'd rather see the time and energy spent on making the cell network more robust.
For that to happen, your cell rates would go way up, and there would have to be a way for true emergency users to get priority over "hey, Aunt Martha, we're all ok" kinds of calls. The mandated increase in capacity/redundancy/backup that would force rates up would be another example of government sponsored profiteering, wouldn't it?
The true issue is that nobody wants to pay for the overbuilding necessary to deal with disaster resiliency. Do you build your house to survive a 500 year earthquake, for example? Do you install a trunked radio system with 40 channels "just in case", when you only use two or three at most during normal operations? When you build your 911 PSAP, do you build another fully functional one at the same time "just in case"? Do you have the budget to do it right twice, or just enough to do it right once?